Quote of the day - on conservatives in academia

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From Jonathan Haidt's review on political diversity (or rather its absence) in social psychology:

Conservative graduate students and assistant professors are behaving rationally when they keep their political identities hidden, and when they avoid voicing the dissenting opinions that could be of such great benefit to the field. Moderate and libertarian students may be suffering the same fate.

I asked a while back why there are so few right-wing sociologists (effectively none - although there are a couple of libertarian sorts). It's good to see some real academic confirmation of this as a problem, that having some colleagues who don't automatically blame society's ills on capitalism or neo-liberalism might be a good thing.

Nothing will change though. Most universities will remain hostile places for anyone who wants to explore society from a conservative perspective.

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I've discovered why there aren't any right-wing sociologists. Lefty academics are biased.

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Well pretty close to that - these are social psychologists:

Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that most social psychologists who responded to their survey were willing to explicitly state that they would discriminate against conservatives. Their survey posed the question: "If two job candidates (with equal qualifications) were to apply for an opening in your department, and you knew that one was politically quite conservative, do you think you would be inclined to vote for the more liberal one?" Of the 237 liberals, only 42 (18%) chose the lowest scale point, "not at all." In other words, 82% admitted that they would be at least a little bit prejudiced against a conservative candidate, and 43% chose the midpoint ("somewhat") or above. In contrast, the majority of moderates (67%) and conservatives (83%) chose the lowest scale point ("not at all").

And the same went for assessing grants and reviewing papers. What really saddens me in all this is that these biased lefties - 'liberals' in American-speak - are completely destroying the relevance of their discipline. When reviewing anything written by most social scientists (economics being the possible exception), you have to assume that the the research is skewed by a prejudged left-of-centre ideology.

I've said before that the sociology department that sets out to recruit a group of centrist or right-of-centre thinkers is going to clean up on breaking new ground in the subject.

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